Killing Happy
by Jordanna Morgan
Summary: The night when Arthur let go.


**Title:** Killing Happy  
**Author:** Jordanna Morgan  
**Archive Rights:** Please request the author's consent.  
**Rating/Warnings:** PG for dark psychological themes.  
**Characters:** Arthur Fleck.  
**Setting:** Arthur's breakdown in his apartment after reading Penny's hospital records.  
**Summary:** The night when Arthur let go.  
**Disclaimer:** Joker belongs to DC Comics and Warner Brothers. I'm just playing with him.  
**Notes:** It took me some time to define my personal opinion of when Arthur Fleck truly became Joker. This fic is an exploration of my answer to that.  
Submitted to Genprompt Bingo for the prompt "Transformation", because that really is what this is about.

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The laughter wracked Arthur's body, his thin frame writhing into knots, his hands clawing for something to anchor him through the spasms. Finding the pillow beside him on the couch, he dragged it up to his chest. He bent his head to bury his face in it, to bite down on the fabric, to compulsively muffle the outbursts that wrenched his gut and scraped his throat raw… only to force himself to push the pillow away again.

_No more._

When a laughing fit in public left Arthur gasping for breath and clutching his throat, it must have looked to people—or at least to the few who paid any notice at all—as if the laughter caused him pain. Even the doctors and the social workers believed that; but they were all so terribly wrong.

The truth was, what hurt him was _fighting_ it.

_Your laugh is a sickness in your head, Happy. It's not normal. That's why you have to try to stifle it. Keep it inside you._

_Be _ashamed _of it._

Now he finally realized that was just one more lie in the _lifetime_ of lies Penny Fleck had fed to him.

The mere thought was enough to raise a new surge of violent guffaws. He arched his spine over the back of the couch, sucking in gulps of air to fuel the paroxysm. His body tried to tense against it until he choked, but he swallowed back the resistance and let it come.

Ever the obedient boy, he _had_ fought it for his entire life; but maybe it wasn't just about doing as he was told. Maybe it was because he had always sensed the darkness roiling _beneath_ the laughter. Maybe he knew deep down that if he truly freed that seething force inside him, it would consume him forever.

Now he wanted nothing more.

_(Child was abandoned.)_

The words on the adoption certificate were burned into his mind. He had been unpersoned—_unwanted_—from the very beginning.

Arthur Fleck really had never existed after all.

In the wake of that revelation, every fragile reason he ever had to deny the darkness was gone… but over the years, the sheer habit had become so ingrained in his body that it was physically hard to let go.

He just wanted to stop _stopping_. To surrender, to let it _happen_, the same way it did that night on the subway.

At the time, he hadn't even meant to. It was only that under the weight of the despair and fear and _pain_, he didn't have the strength to refuse it anymore.

Funny how the gun had found its way into his _left_ hand, its deadly aim a contrast to the crooked fragments of left-handed scrawl that were scattered throughout his journal.

Funny how the release had left him… _lighter_.

For a while, anyway. Until he discovered that things really could get even _worse_ than what he'd thought was the worst day of his life. Until every broken fragment of his world was ground to dust completely, and there was nothing left to do but to scatter it to the winds; to give himself once and for all to what had awakened in him that night.

Or rather, to the one thing that had _always_ been with him.

The joke was on him all along. The part of him that he'd spent his whole life struggling against was the part that was strong, that could _protect_ him—and only now did he understand that was exactly what it had tried to do. That was the very reason it fought to emerge every time he was upset or afraid. It wanted to stand in place of a man who could never stand for himself, because _he_ was the one that had never truly been real.

But the one that _was_ real could still be everything he had always wanted to be… for the trifling price of his soul.

A fresh burst of laughter welled up. It seemed to be torn from deeper inside him than ever before, but this time, his body relaxed. A sense of tranquility flowed through him, like the kind he only felt when he danced.

Closing his eyes, he threw back his head to welcome it…

And the pain was gone.

* * *

"_**You used to tell me that my laugh was a condition; that there was something wrong with me. There isn't. That's the real me."**_

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**End Notes:** Writing this fic took me back to a quote I once read. "It's hard to let go of the demons inside; they were holding you when no one else would." In _Joker_, Arthur ends up embracing his own proverbial demon instead, but I think the latter part of the quote suits him perfectly. "All I have are negative thoughts" could be taken a bit more literally than the mere surface meaning.  
A couple of details from the film that I took into consideration here: after this scene, we don't see anything even remotely resembling another compulsive-laughter fit until the end in Arkham Hospital, when Arthur is no doubt heavily medicated again. To me this suggests that his Joker persona doesn't exhibit the laugh because, when suppressed, it _is_ the laugh. Secondly, before he kills Penny Fleck in the following scene, Arthur speaks her full name and mutters, "I always hated that name." My interpretation is that he is not actually referring to Penny's name, but to bearing the Fleck name himself—while his use of the past tense indicates he has now rejected it and fully assumed the identity of Joker, even before taking on the outer manifestation of the makeup.

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_2019 Jordanna Morgan_


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